The Getaway Special

30

The sun set way too soon. Judy and Allen and the butterfly had barely gotten into sentences like “I fly to tree” before the clouds over the mountain turned red and the shadows began to deepen. Judy would have gone on with the language lesson all night, but when the light began to fail, the butterfly, whom they’d begun calling “Tippet” as the closest approximation they could manage to its name, lifted into the air and said, “Tppppt go skkkkk dark.”

“You can stay with us,” Judy said, but she knew there were too many new concepts even in that short a sentence for Tippet to understand. “Tippet stay here dark,” she said, patting the side of the Getaway.

The butterfly paused, evidently considering her offer, then said, “No. Tppppt go. Come back sun east sky bright.”

Judy was getting good at puzzling out the sentences he made with his limited—but fast growing—vocabulary. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll be here at sunrise. Sun east sky bright is sunrise. Sunrise. Understand?”

“Sunrise. Understand. Tppppt come back sunrise.” Then the butterfly turned away and flew up over the trees, heading south. That was toward the river. Maybe tomorrow they could kill two birds with one stone: get some water and see where the aliens lived.

Since Tippet had seemed able to hear them just fine without the radio, Allen had left the receiver turned on with the volume cranked up and had climbed out of the Getaway to participate in the language lesson. Now he leaned back against the side of the tank and said, “He’s obviously not afraid of bats or birds, or he wouldn’t be flying up high like that. I wonder if he’s at the top of the food chain here.”

“Add that to the list of questions,” Judy said. She’d been keeping mental note of all the things she wanted to ask when they learned how to communicate well enough. It was a long list. But at the rate they were going, they might start whittling it down pretty soon.

They had given up trying to learn Tippet’s language, but that was mostly because he was so much faster at learning English. He only needed to be told the names of things once, and he could pick up simple verbs like “walk” and “run” after only a couple of demonstrations. He didn’t have any trouble forming the words, either. His pronunciation was so good, in fact, that Judy suspected he was somehow storing them and playing them back when he needed them, which implied computer technology and digital sampling capability at least as good as humanity’s, if not better.

“Intelligent butterflies,” she said, shaking her head. “Who’d have guessed?”

Allen crossed his arms over his chest. “Bugs have a pretty well developed social structure, so it’s not too surprising that they could develop high-order brains.”

“It’s the size of the package that amazes me.” Judy flexed her hand to get the blood flowing in it again. She’d been holding it out as a landing platform for most of an hour, taking breaks only when Tippet flew over to something to name it. “And all that tiny stuff he was carrying with him. That’s some serious miniaturization there.”

Allen laughed. “I doubt if Tippet looks at it that way. That’s just the size you build things if you’re his scale.”

“I guess.” She looked out into the forest, which was taking on a different character as twilight deepened toward night and the shadows spread beneath the trees. What other sorts of creatures might live here? Tippet was the only animal they’d seen all day, but who knew what might come out at night? Tippet traveled armed, if that little stinger of his was what it looked like. That implied the existence of something at least dangerous to him.

On the other hand, she and Allen had traveled armed today, too, and that was because they didn’t know what to expect. But Tippet presumably did.

“Oh,” she said out loud.

“What?”

“I just realized something. Tippet must have come looking for us on purpose, after he saw us land. That’s why the video camera and the radio and the stinger and stuff. I was wondering why he was so well prepared for a first-contact situation, but it makes sense if he was expecting it.”

“Hmm,” Allen said. “I never thought about that, but yeah, you could be right. He did seem to be pretty well equipped.”

“I wonder if he told any of his friends about us, or if he’s keeping the discovery to himself?”

Allen climbed onto the tank and held out a hand to help Judy up. “Well, I don’t know about him, but we were broadcasting at a couple of hundred watts. Unless he’s the only one with a radio, we could have had an audience for kilometers around.”

Judy shivered at the thought of thousands of aliens knowing about them. Even as tiny as Tippet was, if a bunch of his compatriots decided to come after the intruders with pitchforks, things could get ugly. There had been no indication that Tippet thought that way, but humans didn’t all think alike; why should butterflies?

“Let’s, uh, make sure we’re ready to jump at a moment’s notice tonight, eh?”

He paused with one foot inside the Getaway and one out. “You expecting trouble?”

“No. Just paranoid.”

“Ah. Well, there’s no harm in being prepared.”

They climbed inside and settled in for the night. Judy set the pistol on the five-gallon bucket that housed the auxiliary hyperdrive so either she or Allen could get to it, and he put the computer in landing mode so all he would have to do if they needed to jump was hit the escape button and it would take them 100,000 kilometers into space. They had to switch on the flashlights so they could see what they were doing, but as soon as they had zipped themselves into their sleeping bags and snuggled into place, Judy switched the lights off. Their plasma batteries would last for months, but she didn’t want the tank glowing like a beacon in the night. They were high-intensity halogen lights; even shining into the milky-white bags to diffuse their beams, they were bright enough to light up the inside of the tank like day.

She wished they could close the hatches, but then they would have to use their internal oxygen supply to keep the air from growing stale. They couldn’t afford to do that; they needed the rest of their oxygen for the trip home. Closing the hatches wouldn’t offer much protection anyway, since they opened inward. She and Allen would just have to stay alert.

“I’ll keep first watch,” she offered. Her voice echoed in the enclosed space. It might have been the only sound on the whole planet as far as she could tell.

“Oh, sure,” Allen said. “Very generous of you, considering we’re both too wired to sleep.”

“All right, then, let’s draw straws.”

“Why don’t we just see who drops off first, and the other guy can stay awake for a while longer.”

She snorted. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. What if we both fall asleep?”

“Then we both get some sleep. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Famous last words.”

Allen didn’t reply right away, and when he did it was to say, “This is when my mother is supposed to stick her head in the room and say, ‘You kids knock it off and go to bed.’ ”

Judy giggled. “It is kind of like a slumber party, isn’t it?”

“It is. I definitely feel like a little kid again, that’s for sure.”

“Me too.” Judy felt a lump under her butt, and twisted around so she wasn’t sitting on it anymore. She pulled the sleeping bag up to her neck and inhaled its familiar aroma. It took her right back to childhood, back to the times when she would go car-camping with her dad. They always pitched a tent, and she always intended to spend the night in it, but rain or wind or night noises would keep her awake until she crawled into the back seat of the car.

“You know,” she said, “I haven’t felt this good since… heck, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this good. We’ve discovered aliens!”

Allen let out a long breath. “It’s been a busy day, that’s for sure. Running from the cops this morning, and talking to alien butterflies by nightfall.”

Judy could still hear the squeal of tires as the cars pulled up in front of the house. “I wonder how Trent and Donna are doing?” she asked.

“I’ll bet they’re okay. In a town that size, they probably went to school with half the cops. They’re probably having more trouble with the pipe we cut than anything else.”

“I hope it wasn’t a gas line.” Judy imagined the fireball that could have engulfed the house, and suddenly her euphoria fell away into guilt. What if they’d been hurt? She’d been so caught up in her own problems and her own adventures that she hadn’t really considered the mess they’d left behind, but now that she had time to think about it, she realized she and Allen had been agents of chaos on a personal level as well as a global level. Somehow, thinking that they might have hurt Trent and Donna seemed the worse of the two.

And Dale. If the Feds had hacked through his security, he could be behind bars by now. They might not link him to the bank robberies, but they would know he was laundering money, and they would probably accuse him of drug running if they couldn’t pin anything else on him.

Shit. Why did things always have to work out like that? Trent and Donna hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had Dale, at least not to Judy or Allen. But because of their generosity, now they were all in trouble.

She wondered what was going on elsewhere. Was the government messing with her family, or Allen’s? She hadn’t even called her dad the whole time she’d been in Wyoming, for fear the call would be traced. She’d meant to call him before they left, but there’d been no time.

Damn the government and their paranoia anyway. Things could have gone so smoothly if they hadn’t overreacted. But no, they had to panic, and now everyone was running around in circles. She imagined the various other governments of the world were doing the same. Instead of building spaceships, they were probably all frantically building hyperdrive bombers. What if someone actually nuked New York, or London, or Paris? That would be bad enough, but she could just imagine the flurry of retaliation from it.

“You still awake?” Allen asked softly.

“Yeah.” Judy sighed. “I’m sitting here beating myself up over all the trouble we’ve caused.”

“Hmm?” He cleared his throat. “Weren’t you feeling good just a minute ago?”

“I was, but then it hit me how much confusion we left behind.”

“Oh. Every silver lining has its black cloud, eh?” He said it in a joking tone of voice, but it still stung.

“I’m just thinking about things, that’s all.”

“Okay.” She didn’t need light to see the gesture that went with that one word: hands held out in front of him, palms toward her.

She hated it when people did that, but she didn’t want to get into it with Allen. Not now. She just settled back against the wall of the tank and rested her head in the groove between two of the wide corrugations.

She might have fallen asleep, or she might have just been drifting, but a noise from outside brought her upright in an instant. It was a sucking sound, like someone pulling their foot out of the mud, and it sounded so real and so close that she half expected to hear whoever was out there say “Damn it!” as they lost their shoe.

It happened again.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

From Allen’s side of the tank came only soft breathing.

She stuck her feet under the auxiliary hyperdrive and jostled his beanbag. “Allen! Wake up!”

“Mmm?”

The sucking noise came closer.

“Something’s out there! Something big.”

“What? Where?”

“Outside!” She felt for the gun, but couldn’t find it on the top of the bucket where she had left it. She patted around among the food and spacesuits at the base of it, but she couldn’t find it there, either.

“Where’s the gun? Have you got it?”

“No, I—”

Something scraped against the side of the tank, and they both yelped in terror. “Yaah!”

Allen banged against something. “Ow! Should we jump? Should we jump?”

“Not yet.” If they did that with both hatches open, they would lose all their air in one big whoosh. Judy reached up and felt for Allen’s hatch and slammed it closed, but instead of closing her own, she snatched one of the flashlights mounted between them, ripped it loose from its duct-tape loop, and stood up, flipping on the light and aiming it out into the night.

It still had the plastic bag on the end. The sudden glare was like a strobe going off right in front of her face; she yanked it free and shined the light outward again, hoping whatever was out there had been blinded just as badly.

When her eyes recovered, there was nothing to see. She swept the beam around in a full circle, but all she saw were trees and bushes. No eyes glowing in the light, no shadowy figures slipping furtively into cover; just the same fernlike trees they had seen during the day. One of the rubbery branches on the closest tree had drooped down toward the tank, and that was apparently what had scraped against it. She couldn’t see what might have made the sucking sound, but nothing was moving now. She couldn’t hear anything, either, but the pounding of her heart could have masked a jet engine.

“What’s out there?” Allen asked. “Do you see anything?”

“No. Just the forest.” She waved the light around, trying to spot anything that might be trying to sneak up on them, but the only motion she saw was the shadows she created.

Her sleeping bag had slid down around her ankles. She kicked it off, instinctively freeing her feet in case she had to run, even though she knew that flight in this case meant a completely different thing.

The light was bright enough to make her squint, even after her eyes had adapted. She waved it overhead and it cast a widening searchlight cone into the sky, but there was nothing up there, either, so she shined it back on the tree.

“It’s gone.”

“You sure?”

“No.” Whatever had made that noise hadn’t made a peep since. If it could move away silently, it would have approached silently.

She shined her light at the branch that had brushed the tank, a rubbery, maybe-hydraulic branch like the one that stayed put for a few seconds after she had flexed it. This one angled down from the trunk toward her, the tuft of greenery at its tip just a foot or so from the plastic.

She didn’t remember any trees being that close before. In fact, she was nearly certain the closest one had been twenty or thirty feet away.

How had Sherlock Holmes put it? “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Something like that.

If that was the case, then the trees were sneaking up on them.